Web-to-Print in the Real World: A discussion with Andrew Simmons
The following is a conversation with Andrew Simmons of the Social Print Experiment and Printelope about starting a Web-to-Print business. Ryan: How did you come up with the name Printelope for your Web-to-Print storefront? Andrew: Printelope is two works shoved together - Print, and Envelope. We originally thought we would print a lot of envelopes with the MGI DP60 press, since doing envelopes on the press is highly profitable, and easy. Ryan: Why did you limit your product mix to static cling, envelopes, and letter head, for the site? Andrew: I don't want to fight in the trenches for the 13x19 work, the same stuff that every HP, Nexpress and Xerox digital printer sells. Those price points are very competitive, and there are a lot of printers treading water, selling cheap enough to get the work but not enough to make money. We choose to print what others can't, which drives our profit margin up. Ryan: Will you continue to add more items to the site? Andrew: We're adding more envelopes, more specialty stocks, but none of the common items. Business cards? No interest. Tabloid prints on 60# offset. No thanks. But plastics, mylars, static cling, envelopes - I want to print it all, at a fair but profitable price. Ryan: Is this your first W2P site build? Andrew: In this project, yes. I actually built a simple web2print system with a vendor for a business card site for a hospital 9 years ago. It was on the PageDNA platform, before they were PageDNA, and it was like an "Ah ha" moment when I realized that the people I was talking to today were the same ones from 9 years ago. They even remembered my support name at the time, which was a reference to my height - sixfoot8inches. Incidentally, that same system is still in use today by that same hospital. Ryan: Do you lean more toward perfecting and building out one site or having multiple storefronts? Andrew: Perfecting a site is what I like to do, since once I have the site done I can clone them and the just customize the options for it. PageDNA makes it very easy to do, and I could have 20-30 stores almost overnight once I perfect the first store. Ryan: How crucial, in your opinion, is customer service from your W2P vendor in determining the level of success and time frame for launching a site? What other criteria did you use for narrowing down your selection to PageDNA? Andrew: Customer service is very important to the success of a site. The intricacies of a system take some time to learn, and even with as much time as I've put in to it, I still find that I can't remember where to find something. PageDNA also has a great professional services offering at a small cost, which I would recommend to anyone going down this route. I was able to build my initial site without much help, but I already had a feel for the system since I had worked with something similar 9 years ago. The other criteria for the selection really had came down to a gut feeling, and whether or not they would be around to support me in the future. There are a TON of web2print solutions out there, and many with not a large customer base, which would be the bread and butter of their own survival. One company I had included in the criteria had changed hands, was regrouping, and basically said they couldn't operate as an ASP model. If I had selected them and then 6 months down the road they closed, what happens to my work? Whether you build a web2print site a la carte or use a packaged system, I really think it takes about three months to get it built and tuned.












